The Only World: Poems - Hardcover

Hull, Lynda; Wojahn, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060553634 ISBN 13: 9780060553630

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1995

Synopsis

A stunning collection of poems that touch upon the most pressing issues of our time, by an award-winning poet who was one of the most dynamic and highly regarded figures of her generation.

About this title

About the Author

Lynda Hull was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1954, and was the author of two previous collections of poetry, Ghost Money and Star Ledger. She was the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council, and winner of the Carl Sandburg Award; she also received four Pushcart Prizes, the Juniper Prize and the Edwin Piper Memorial Prize. She died in 1994.

From Publishers Weekly

Hull's (Star Ledger) long, intriguingly complex poems often send readers back to discover how she took them from point A to point B. Here the opening poem serves as fit introduction to her subject matter: three urban adolescent girls in the mid-'60s dress up and imitate the Supremes and the Vandellas; less than a year later, one is pregnant, gang-raped, out of school; "I'm a lucky bitch," the poet knows. Next come memorials for deceased friends of a reckless youth, victims of AIDS, drugs, prostitution, abuse in all the "parallel lives, the ones/ I didn't choose, the one that kept her." Hull's hungry receptiveness permits easy identification with others, even those she's only heard about, such as her mother's family, Polish Jews caught in the Holocaust. This glittering, elegiac collection ("& it's just me here, the one who's left") is ultimately, hauntingly, an elegy for herself. Hull died in an auto accident in March 1994; these poems were compiled by her husband, the poet David Wojahn.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0060553634
• ISBN 13: 9780060553630
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80